why i love eliot

people have asked me lately why eliot is "personal." i thought about it, and i think i have at least somewhat been able to solidify my reasons. one of his main themes is the peculiar dilemma of modern suffering as a result of the desacralisation of love and the replacing of love with lust. yet he recognizes, too, the beauty and redemption that can come from this suffering. the violated, muted nightingale is given an eternal song through her metamorphosis. tragedy can be beautiful, and art can relieve the tragedy. and also, for eliot, his art both leads to and records the capability of art to lead to spiritual salvation and redemption.
people complain of him being "difficult," but i would say that the waste land, at least (which in comparison to his whole corpus is as brideshead revisited to the rest of evelyn waugh's novels) merely exemplifies the difficulty of all poetry. all good poetry is that difficult, although we often do not realize it. i think with other poetry, we can have a sort of arrogance in assuming we fully understand both the artist's intent and the full possibility and layers of meaning contained in the poem. more traditional poetry,i think, often is only illusorily more accessible. i think it is all as difficult as eliot, although not all as difficult as pound. (WINK)
some of the things eliot says are, indeed, pompous and ridiculous. but much more of what he says is beautiful and profound and really necessary as an antidote to modernity and the post-modern project of solipsism, relativism, subjectivism, and atheism. which is why contemporary academia hates eliot. and as i recently said, i am a twig from eliot's branch, a fact i discovered, not decided. so i will champion him and the modernists' project as long as i am able, because it is fundamental to the nature of literature, to the nature of the word itself.